Its Diwali Time!

After a really long time.. 5 years to be exact, I had the rare opportunity of my parents being with Priya and me for Diwali. We missed having Priya's parents around! It would have been a blast!!!

It was our first family Diwali together! Missed Priya's parents and my brother though...Mom made sweets and batshinams at home.

We got up early in the morning, started the Nadaswaram MP3's :-), Sat in our puja room where mom gave Priya and me a liberal dose of kaachina thenga yennai, had our head / oil bath, wore new clothes! looked trrrrrrrrrraditonal in attire!

If only we had Sri, Leela, Karthik and our 1000,000 wala sarams!!!!

Kutlu's 9 Lives

Our Kutlu has a life of its own... wonder what ever goes on into its teensy weensy mind.
I have captured 5 of them here.

Yes yes, keep taking all those photographs and let me prep for my
long afternoon nap!!!












Aaaaaaaaaaaah! Life's fun when all I got to do is zzzzzzzzzzzzz










I am dreaaaaaaaaaaaaamin Dead Rats!!!!








Morons keep yaking away blah blah blah.. let me catch my teddy winks!!!






Nothing like a siesta after a nice meal in the afternoon!!!!

We recently went for a Chicago-Niagara-Syracuse-New York - Cincinnati trip before Karthik departed to Sweden for his office trip. One of the pictures that really stood out was this one.

My Birthday Cake

Priya baked this wonderful cake for my Birthday.






I was stuck in Cincinnati on 10th, so we celeberated it belatedly last weekend.



The challenge priya had was to get a really good taste but avoiding the calories that come with a rich cake.





In the end, it came out really delicious, and much of the cake was consumed by her friend than me or Priya.









The cake had only egg whites, the icing fat free cream, sugar and splenda mix. On the whole, a really delecious cake with less than 30% of the guilt ;-)

Intrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooducing Kutlu!!! (Drumroll...)

You must be wondering why this weird name for a kitten, but
funnily enough, it does not answer to its actual name! Sheeba! Kutlu a.k.a Sheeba came to our house about 3 weeks ago, when

Priya picked it up from the Kalamazoo Animal Shelter...
She used the age old trick of convincing me of getting this kitten... "Neenga Cincinati ku poita, veedu orey soogama aidarathu..." and had the expression that Puss in Boots had in Shrek the Third.

I didnt really have a lot of choice you see....

If I had refused.. "Kaapi tumblera NUNG!!! nu veppa", "Rasathula uppu jasthi", "Dosai ketta, idli thickness ku varum!!! In order to survive such a calamitious lifestyle, I decided to do what all husbands have been doing for ages for survival...knowing that "words are mightier than dosai kallu", we use deft and skillful wordplay to avoid WW-III .

Famous words of yesteryears came to play...

It took just two words to maintain world peace...

"Yes Dear" ...was all I had to utter.

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Kutlu finally came home after her 1st batch of shots and deworming,

first thing it does, starts chasing its own tail, runs around in circles furiously!!! "Namma ooru pamparam nyabakam than vanthuthu!!!" then looks up with giddyness and goes flop! It was a hilarious moment, and became a part of the Pu-Plux-Palghat clan ever since!

Kashi Trip

My parents, moms cousins from Mumbai and their respective families decided to embark on a pilgrimage to Rameshwaram and Kashi. This trip was to pay respects to our forefathers, our ancestors.


The trip started with going to Ramaeshwaram, initiating the pujas there, going to Kashi. Collecting the sand from the banks of Ganges, coming back to Rameshwaram and dissolving it in Rameshwaram waters. The journey signifies the life and death of all our forefathers and us paying respects to them.





Lingams were made from sand from Rameshwaram and carried over to Kashi to be dissolved at banks of Ganges.










The trip takes us to Prayag, modern day Allahabad, where Ganga (Ganges) , Yamuna and Saraswati meet. This place is considered very auspicious in Indian mythology.

The cat's out of the bag!

We got a cute kitty cat, Sushi at our home.


Priya's friend Catlyin had to shift apartments and loaned her cat to us for some time. We had an intersting episode where we visited an emergency Vet ward as it got sick in our house.

The cat simply got dehydrated, like a small baby, that she is! simply refused to drink water!!!

All she liked doing was much on her karvadam like Cat food and not drink thy water.

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Shatyabthapoorthy

My parents had their Shatyabthapoorthy conducted last week. Its similar to renewing ones marriage vows.
Here are some of the snaps from the event.




The homams were conducted in their usual flair, with 7 vadhyar's each upping the tempo! It was a memorable event (as seen from my brother's eyes). I am seriously impressed by their capacity to go on and on in the sweltering Chennai heat!




A much needed break for Dad and Mom from Chennai's Agninatshathiram. The sweltering heat makes people vaporize! After a nice piping hot homam :-), the groom and the bride get a nice Abishekam! At least that will cool them down a bit!







The final garlanding takes place where groom says, "Yes I do".
This I do is not for "Do you take this woman as your wife" but for "I shall continue to pay all your credit cards, bills, and renovate the kitchen"

And then mom says "Yes I do"
This I do is for "Yes, I shall continue making nice soodana pakodas, muruku, seedai, sambar vadai etc." (Slurrrup!")




And then all goes back to normal, everyone back to hating the chennai heat, enjoying a nice evening on T.N. Seshagopalan's cutchery and sipping nice hot kaapi!

Mani's Poonal

My nephew's upanayanam took place last week, here is a brief glimpse of what its all about!


More details to follow soon....

Budgeting!

I did what all men ask their wifey to do - "Budget Cuts!!!" On a fine Monday morning, off I am paying my credit card bills! I realize I am spending waaayyyyyy more than what I normally did....
Naturally, I shifted the blame game to my dearest wifey!
"Priya, we need to start running a tight ship", "we are leaking dollars everywhere"










"What happened hubby? Spending is normal, stinginess ain't!", says Priya. "Plus you are not single any more, expenses are expected to go up!"
"Last month we ran up quite a bill on expenses!" I exclaim, "We need to cut it down"

I could feel a chill creeping between us, I try to remember all the stuff that I read on "Men are from Mars,Women are from Venus" at that moment of time, my mind is a blank.

Have you ever had a dessert wine? Its sweet but really chilled.
The Ice Wine Speaks - "Off you go to the office, we will talk about this later today"

I do not think any more about it till I get a mail from my wifey....
It contains a nice little excel spreadsheet with breakdowns on what money was spent on and what not!
See if for yourselves...
I guess my dearest wifey saw all these numbers as barcodes!
She was scanning 'n ' churning them as the self service aisle at Walmart!

After I read the mail, I came to the following conclusion.


If your strong point is not finance, don't bring it up.
If your wife is an MBA in finance, never question her numbers.
Always accept the fact that its always your fault, your wife is always right.
You are mere participant in grander scheme of things, wifey is the Kapitän of the ship!




Now how do I tell her, It is ooookayyyy if the coffee table does not match the coffee cups....?

Red's Game!

Our project team went for a nice game of baseball...
Reds Vs Astros!





Game moved at a brisk pace with we getting an opportunity of seeing 4 homers!
The foul balls came flying by whenever the batter edged a swing! Cricket is way more livelier! But Baseball is short! Our 20-20 should do the trick!

This was the first time I actually saw cheerleaders in a Baseball game! Looks like this has become an all prevalant thingy!



The best thing I liked was after the 4th innings, we had a "stretch song", where everyone stands up to stretch their legs, and a song plays with lyrics in the giant screen! Everyone sings along! It was fun!
PS: Reds could have played better.

Samaithu Paar!

Our team had an intersting cooking bonaza out at my client site! Everyone was broken into 3-4 groups, we made desi stuff, panner masala, chapati, samosas and votnot!














I got praises from the chef for parathufying the perfect chapati!














Of course! I didnt tell that to my wife, lest she asks me to cook!

Mr & Mrs Iyer.

Interesting isn't it? One day you are single, the next day you have a "significant other". Introducing my wife Priya and her family. We have officially become Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.




Priya's family is from Bangalore, she is currently studying in Michigan. Her parents are currently in Indonesia where her dad is a technical director of a textile company. These are some of the snaps from our marriage.

Interestingly, Karthik and Anusha (Priya's cousin) think getting us married off is a very baaaaad mistake.








Everyone! who came to our marriage and reception kept asking them, "So....onga anna/akka line clearr", "ahem", "onga kalyanam yeppo!"








Karthik got so peeved that he comes to us and says "Deys, onga reundu perukkum kalyanam panni vechathu periya vamba pochu da!" "Oru valiba paiyana summa vida maatangale!"

Anusha chips in "I know!!!!!, Its like my marriage is more important than this freak occurrence in the universe!"


"Chinna chirisunga, konja naal sandoshama irukattum"

Family Portrait

Finally!


Finally aftera long "vaaku vaatham" my dad agreed to come out for a family potrait.

We went to the nearby Kodak photo shop to get our snaps.

"Rendu 12 x 10 family snap podu pa!", says my bro to the camera man.

"Pichuduiren saar!", "Appa ammava thaniya yedukunugala?"

"Aammam, oru sitting, inoonu, naanga naalu perum"

It took around 25 snaps to get the rare one where my dad finally smiled!